In an earlier and truer-hearted age, Paradise was believed to be a garden, and it was the Fruit of a Tree of Life which would make men live forever. But when, as Gibbon satirically observes, in the dissolution of the Roman world, men coveted only a place in the Celestial City of gold and pearl, the secret of immortality was sought (not inappropriately) at the bottom of a Rosicrucian crucible. There was, it must be confessed, a profound _vulgarity_ in this whole system of costly medicine, which it would be flattering to ourselves to think we had in our day quite overpassed and discarded. But in truth, though we are not wont to dissolve pearls or powder emeralds or drink solar or even lunar “Oyl,” it may be fairly asked whether we do not contrive to melt down a handful of sovereigns in every attack of illness to very little better purpose than if we had simply given them to an old alchemist to put in his furnace and make for us an elixir of life? What are these long rows of items in our druggist’s bill for draughts, embrocations, liniments, blisters, gargles, and what not, represented, when the housemaid clears our room for convalescence, by a whole regiment of quarter-emptied phials and pill-boxes on our table? What are those considerable drafts recorded in our check-book, not only for the attendance of our customary medical adviser (which might be reasonable), but for the visits of the eminent consulting physician, brought down, perchance, fifty or five hundred miles to look at us for five minutes while we lay speechless in our fever? Did anybody ever use one-half, or even one-third, of the expensive medicines ordered in every illness from the pharmacy day after day? Or did anybody find a medical man, in view of a patient’s straitened circumstances, telling his anxious friends that the remains of the last bottle of his physic would answer as well as a new one, or that they might readily change it, by adding a few drops of some fresh ingredient, instead of ordering another six ounces from the chemist, to be set aside in its turn, half used, to-morrow? Or (what is still more to the purpose) did anybody ever hear of a case wherein the physician summoned for consultation (possibly at enormous cost) has given his honest opinion that the regular medical attendant of the patient has mistaken his case, and that the treatment ought to be altogether reversed? The same idea has been at the bottom of our proceedings and those of our ancestors which we ridicule; namely, that if we do but spend money enough, a cure _must_ follow.